Polymer Chain-Population Photooxidative Scission

Sunlight doesn't just erode a single microplastic particle from the outside in — across a whole population of dispersed polymer chains, it snaps backbone bonds essentially at random, independent of where in the chain they sit. This simulator tracks a full population of polymer chains drifting in the water column, each one a string of bonded monomers. Every live bond carries the same Arrhenius-governed scission rate driven by UV intensity, temperature and dissolved-oxygen sliders; when a bond breaks, its chain splits into two independent fragments that drift apart. The live readouts and the plotted curve of 1/Mₙ against exposure time trace out the classic Saito random-scission law directly from the population's own statistics — a genuinely different, complementary view of the same photooxidative chemistry the 3D companion sim renders as a single fragmenting lattice.